We often underestimate how powerful vape hardware is to give us the best and most enjoyable vaping experience, with a series of buttons and an LCD screen on the side of many box mods helping people to adjust their experience.
Because of the technology inside the device, some enterprising hackers ended up asking themselves a surprisingly familiar question; can it play Doom?
For those who don’t know, Doom is a 1993 computer game made by iD Software that has for three decades been phenomenally successful and popular, leading to five direct sequels, as well as conversions to basically any device that can run it, including old mobile telephones and graphic calculators.
However, some people have taken this a lot further, getting Doom to run on pregnancy tests, seven-segment displays, digital cameras and within itself, and so the question has become simultaneously a joke within programming circles and also an authentic challenge.
The reason why people can at least try to get Doom working on all of these systems is that in 1997, the game’s source code was released, allowing people to examine how the game was made with the intention of ensuring the game could still be played as technology became more advanced.
Initially, this allowed for versions of the game to be made that supported bigger screens, better processors and modern controllers, but after the more sensible aspects of source porting were completed, coders started to have fun.
The culmination of this was a picture in 2021 that showed the famous Doom interface running on a vape, which made people excited that the game was somehow running on a chunky vape.
However, ultimately this was a hoax, as this was not the game running but a custom interface that resembled the original game. However, with vapes having at least some of the technology you need to run the game already in the device, it may only be a matter of time.
